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Every team that builds a large web application can generally pick from the following: delivering application functionality on time, with high quality, or high performance. Teams can pick one or two of the options, but they can’t pick all three.

Most teams opt to only focus on performance if and when it becomes a problem. This, unfortunately, can be far too late for some projects. Anyone who has been in the industry can empathize with both sides of the equation – choosing to defer performance concerns, as well as seeing the negative impact it can have on the success of the product as a whole.

It is a lesson I’ve learned from hard experience, so I want to make sure others can learn from my mistakes. In this post, I suggest a handful of principles that help to find a happy medium for delivering high-quality software applications while focusing on performance.

Significant improvements can be realized even if only one or two of the principles are applied. Applying all of them, of course, will produce the best results.

You may think of Agile as just another process. While this is incorrect (as it is a framework created to help developers create processes), there is a fundamental difference between this methodology and most methodologies that have come before.

Agile–done the way it was intended–is revolutionary. Fundamentally, Agile is an advocate of a bottom-up development process. I believe this is why it is often proposed with good intention, however then implemented with a top-down, fixed idea of what the Agile team (and hence the process) will be like.

If you take time to read the Agile Manifesto you will read statements like: ”The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Just consider that for a second. The team has the power to keep what works and dispose of what does not.

There are some basic concepts that allow Agile development to be successful. In this post, I highlight the key parts of Agile that appeal to me (as a reluctant process advocate) and have enabled successful Agile development in recent projects…